Picture of the day

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9 August 2010

It has been an unusually hot summer in parts of Russia.

This map released by NASA shows how temperatures across Asia deviated from their expected values in the period from 20 July to 27 July this year. It is derived from data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite, compared with average temperatures in the region between 2000 and 2008.

Exceptionally high temperatures which have led to wildfires around Moscow can be seen marked in red and brown.

At the same time, swathes of northern Russia and eastern Kazakhstan were significantly cooler than normal (shown in blue).

(Image: NASA)

6 August 2010

This is not a gremlin – it is the world's smallest monkey, the pygmy marmoset (Callithrix pygmaea).

With an adult body length of only 14 to 16 centimetres, and weighing as little as 120 grams, the endangered pygmy marmoset is one of the smallest primates discovered. They are normally found in the rainforest canopies of South America, however this chap was confiscated after being found inside the clothes of a Peruvian citizen by police.

This marmoset will now recover at a primate rescue and rehabilitation centre near Santiago, Chile.

(Image: Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)

5 August 2010

Spotted from Norway, these auroras were caused by a coronal mass ejection (CME) – a cloud of charged particles that exploded from the sun's surface on Sunday and reached Earth two days later. "The whole sky was dancing before our eyes," says photographer Trym Norman Sannes.

The sun is currently rousing from an extended period of calm. A second CME is expected to reach Earth today, the result of a further solar eruption.

4 August 2010

This brightly coloured Danxia landform is in Hunan province, southern China. The strangely shaped rocks are formed from the red sandstone that has been left behind after erosion carved the narrow, steep valleys separating them.

Six Danxia sites, including this one, from various parts of China have this week been added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, a collection of sites around the world that have outstanding cultural or scientific value.

At the same UNESCO meeting 20 other sites were also added to the list which now encourages tourism and state protection of more than 900 sites around the world.

(Image: Zhang Guang/XinHua/Xinhua Press/Corbis)

3 August 2010

This 16-metre sculpture is of the non-existent dinosaur "Ultrasauros" – the name given to remains discovered in Colorado in 1972 which later turned out to be a mixture of bones from two other species of sauropod dinosaur, Supersaurus and Brachiosaurus.

The piece is called Luna Park and was created in the style of American roadside super-sculptures. It was built in a disused car factory in a village outside Kragujevac in Serbia.

(Image: Matt Sills)

2 August 2010

Designed to image deep space, these six beryllium mirrors have just emerged from the deep freeze.

The mirrors will form part of the James Webb Space Telescope, due for launch in 2014. Once in space, any heat they radiate will obscure the infrared light from distant galaxies, so they must be chilled – but there's a complication. Cooling distorts the mirrors, and to account for this, researchers at the X-ray and Cryogenic Facility at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, chilled the mirrors down to a mere 25 kelvin (-248 °C) and measured the resulting changes in shape.

(Image: NASA/MSFC/David Higginbotham/Emmett Given)

30 July 2010

Buildings were casually brushed aside by this powerful landslide, which hit the village of Wangong in south-west China earlier this week.

Four thousand people had to be evacuated and 21 were reported missing after the event, caused by weeks of torrential rain. The landslide is just the latest disaster to hit China, which has spent weeks battling the worst flooding in a decade.

(Image: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features)

29 July 2010

Think "tiger" and you might think of swampy mangroves or steamy jungles: a pine forest is not the first habitat that comes to mind. But a ruling by the Russian government to protect the Korean pine could help conserve the biggest of the tiger subspecies and the world's largest cat – the Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) – also known as the Siberian tiger.

As few as 400 Amur tigers survive in native Korean pine forests of the Russian far east and north-east China. The pine nuts provide essential food for the animals that the tigers feed on, but illegal logging of the pine trees is threatening what remains of the tiger's habitat.

28 July 2010

A novel offshore wind-turbine design may overcome many of the drawbacks of today's three-bladed propeller-style turbines. As the blades of conventional turbines turn, their own vast weight puts huge stress on the axle and bearing, inducing fatigue in the hub assembly. By switching from a horizontal to a vertical turbine, such punishing stresses can be relieved.

Invented by Wind Power of Bury St Edmunds, UK, a prototype 1-megawatt vertical design is currently under construction. The new design not only alleviates stress but causes less interference with aviation radars, says Wind Power chief Theo Bird.

(Image: Wind Power)

27 July 2010

The world's first recipient of a full face transplant yesterday appeared in public for the first time. Oscar, a 31-year-old Spanish farmer who lost much of his face in a hunting accident five years ago, received his donated face, including a full lower jaw replete with teeth, in an operation on 20 March.

Led by Joan Pere Barret of the Vall d'Hebron hospital in Barcelona, Spain, the doctors who performed the 24-hour operation expect Oscar to regain 90 per cent of his facial functions, including blinking, talking and eating, through rehabilitation therapy over the next 18 months.

(Image: Josep Lago/Stringer/AFP/Getty)

23 July 2010

On this July morning, 75 tonnes of sharks are being processed in the city of Kesennuma in north-eastern Japan. The animals feed a brisk domestic market in shark fins for soup, though some of the meat also ends up in Chinese bowls. Last year, Japanese fishing boats hauled in 35,000 tonnes of shark; 90 per cent of it came through this port, which operates six days a week.

19 July 2010

The Horton Plains slender loris (Loris tardigradus nycticeboides) is so rare that it was thought extinct for much of the 20th century. This picture marks its on-camera debut. The 20-centimetre-long mammal was photographed for the first time in the mountain forests of central Sri Lanka by researchers from the Zoological Society of London.

Lorises are primates just like humans and monkeys, but they belong to a more primitive group called the prosimians.

(Image: Zoological Society of London)

14 July 2010

In a week when the UK hit back at US dominance of the uncrewed aerial vehicle market with a home-grown attack UAV called Taranis, aerospace industry giant Boeing also unveiled its latest drone – this bizarre-looking hydrogen-fuelled aircraft.

Shaped to accommodate a huge hydrogen tank, the Phantom Eye surveillance plane has a 46-metre wingspan and uses two propeller engines to fly at the extremely high altitude of nearly 20 kilometres for up to four days at a time. The craft will soon arrive at NASA's Dryden flight test centre in the Mojave desert, California, for ground tests.

(Image: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features)

13 July 2010

Pictures ranging from extraordinary micrographs to images of humanitarian initiatives in poor countries have been entered into this year's engineering photo competition at the University of Cambridge.

This winning image, entitled Aircraft Engine Flame-Out, was submitted by Rob Gordon and shows burning fuel in a jet engine taken a few tens of milliseconds before the flame extinguishes. Understanding the physics of flame extinction can help designers build safer engines.

The annual contest, run by the university's engineering department, invites anyone who works there – be they a professor, a student or a member of the support staff – to submit a photograph connected with their day-to-day work.

(Image: Rob Gordon/University of Cambridge)

2 July 2010

This microscopic alga was found in a lake in the crater of an extinct volcano in central Turkey. It is a diatom – a kind of alga with silica cell walls – but its species is new to science. With a delicately sculpted shell, it is around 5 micrometres in diameter, making it one of the smallest diatoms known.

A paper describing it will be published in a forthcoming issue of Diatom Research.

(Image: Natural History Museum)

30 June 2010

A simulation of a galaxy made in the image of our own Milky Way gives us a glimpse into galactic history. This particular snapshot looks back 5 billion years.

The simulation, created at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, suggests that the ancient stars which skirt the edges of the Milky Way – stars nearly as old as the universe itself – were not born in our galaxy but ripped out of smaller ones during collisions in the early cosmos.

(Image: Andrew Cooper/John Helly/Durham University)

29 June 2010

This is a castle, a knight and two pawns from what is claimed to be the tiniest chessboard – and chess set – ever built. Each of the pieces is roughly 50 micrometres across, and the board itself is 435 micrometres wide. Each piece is designed to be gripped and moved by a tiny robot arm, meaning that the chess set is playable – although a checkmate on this board might be the smallest victory in the history of chess.

The chess set and board are the work of Tim Dallas's team of students at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Their work won them the novel micro-electromechanical systems design contest held at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, last month.

(Image: Sandia National Laboratories)

28 June 2010

Freshly landed astro-models take off their spacesuit overalls to reveal lower-tech undergarments – creations by US designer Thom Browne.

Browne's future-retro clothing range was a highlight of the spring-summer 2011 menswear show in Paris fashion week, France.

(Image: Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty)

24 June 2010

British artist Andrew Carnie has put his work on display at GV Art, London. Carnie, who has in the past studied chemistry, zoology and psychology – as well as completing two art degrees – involves himself in scientific concepts and themes. His latest display is no exception.

Dendritic or "tree-like" structures are found throughout nature – for example, in snowflakes, immune cells and neurons in the human brain. Their distinctive branches and fractal formations can be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. In nerve cells the tree-like structure increases surface area, helping to boost the computational complexity achievable by individual neurons.

This image is part of Carnie's Magic Forest, which takes the viewer on a colourful journey through a sea of developing neurons, drawing on the work of the Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cahal and neurologist Richard Wingate.

The islands belong to the Aleutian group, a string of active and dormant volcanoes fed by magma created by the north-westward movement of the Pacific tectonic plate beneath the North American plate. At the centre of this image is mount Cleveland, the most active volcano in the region. Cleveland began ejecting low-level ash emissions at the end of May, and whilst this activity is not unusual, it can interfere with flights between Asia and North America.

21 June 2010

Dramatic fires rage on the hills above Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, destroying 4 hectares of forest on the hillside between Lagoa and Copacabana. Local firefighters believe the fire was started by small hot-air balloons released nearby.

The fire hit an area of Atlantic rainforest south of Rio during the night of 19 to 20 June. The Atlantic rainforest is home to many rare and endangered species, including marmosets, the golden-rumped lion tamarin and Rio's own, critically endangered Rio de Janeiro Antwren.

Whilst the Amazon rainforest in the north and west of Brazil has been subject to mass deforestation, the Atlantic rainforest has fared even worse, with over 93 per cent of forest now destroyed, mainly through agricultural spread and the growth of cities, particularly Rio and São Paulo.

(Image: KeystoneUSA/ZUMA/Rex Features)

18 June 2010

As the football World Cup takes place across South Africa, 790 kilometres above, where no one can hear you blow on a vuvuzela, the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite looks down upon Western Cape province and South Africa's second most populous city, Cape Town (shown in white and pink on the northern end of the Cape peninsula, bottom left of image).

But this is one fan that is not interested in the football. Rather, Envisat is concerned with monitoring the land, water, ice and atmosphere of our planet, taking accurate measurements of sea temperature, watching for minute changes in surface heights and collating data on levels of gases.

(Image: ESA)

16 June 2010

This grainy image is visual confirmation that the solar sail launched by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has fully unfurled, following its launch last month. The IKAROS sail is 20 metres corner to corner, but is just 0.0075 millimetres thick. It is designed to harness the motion from photon collisions to provide propulsion.

The photo was taken by a camera ejected from the spacecraft's central hub.

(Image: JAXA)

15 June 2010

This unusual hole punched in a cloud may have been caused by the cloud-seeding effect of aircraft.

Various explanations have been proposed for such holes, from shock waves produced by jet engines to local warming of the air.

Andrew Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and colleagues studied a hole in clouds that appeared above the state capital, Denver. Flight records revealed two aircraft had flown nearby just before it formed. They also measured a band of snowfall minutes after the aircraft passed by.

The team suggest that air was expanded as it passed the propellers and wings of the planes. This caused it to cool enough for cloud droplets to freeze and fall as snow, forming a hole in the cloud.

11 June 2010

After eight centuries, Saint Rose of Viterbo's cause of death has finally been uncovered: she died of an embolism that began in the heart.

The teenage saint, whose mummified body is venerated by devout Roman Catholics, was thought to have died of tuberculosis. But a new scan of her heart, which has been preserved separately, tells a different story. Ruggero D'Anastasio at Gabriele d'Annunzio University in Chieti, Italy, used detailed radiography to examine the saint's heart and found a ventricular diverticulum – a common defect that causes malformation of the diaphragm and sternum.

The radiograph also reveals a heart blockage which, says D'Anastasio, was most probably fatal.

8 June 2010

Our lunar neighbour looms large over Cerro Paranal, the home of the Very Large Telescope in Chile's Atacama desert.

The moon appears large because it is so close to the horizon.

The picture was taken from 14 kilometres away on the road to another mountain, the nearby Cerro Armazones, proposed site of the European Extremely Large Telescope – which as its name suggests is intended to be the biggest telescope on Earth.

(Image: ESO)

4 June 2010

That most romantic of insects, the ephemeral mayfly – which survives for just one day as an adult – has made an impact in an unlikely setting: the radar images produced by US National Weather Service.

If you only lived for a day, you'd want to make sure you quickly found a partner. To ensure that this happens, mayflies synchronise their emergence from their aquatic, larval stage. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, so many of the flies emerged at once from the Mississippi that they showed up on the weather service's Doppler radar as bright pink, purple and white patches.

The patches persisted for 10 to 20 minutes as the mayflies were borne away south-southeast on the wind.

(Image: NOAA)

3 June

Pterosaurs are on their way to London to welcome visitors to the Royal Society's 2010 Festival of Science and Arts. Five life-size models of the flying giants have been made for the event, the largest with a wingspan of more than 9 metres.

Pterosaurs dominated the skies at the time of the dinosaurs, from the late Triassic period to the end of the Cretaceous (220 to 65.5 million years ago).

The replicas have been made at the University of Portsmouth, UK, under the guidance of palaeobiologists Dave Martill, Mark Witton and Bob Loveridge. They were based on fossil records, but details such as colour and eyes were a little more difficult, requiring educated "leaps of faith", says Witton.

Recently discoveries have revealed that pterosaurs would have been covered in hair-like fibres, and this "fuzz" was incorporated into the models.

The pterosaur models will take centre stage in June, welcoming visitors to the Royal Society's 2010 Festival of Science and Arts, which runs at the Southbank Centre, London, from the 25 June to 4 July.

(Image: Russell Sach)

1 June

A tropical storm has hit Guatemala, bringing with it torrential rains, adding to the disruption already caused by an earlier volcano eruption. Tropical storm Agatha hit the country on Saturday and so far has killed more than 100 people and left a swathe of destruction, including this gaping 60-metre-deep sinkhole in central Guatemala City.

Sinkholes form where the underlying rock is sedimentary or can be easily dissolved. Groundwater circulating through it dissolves the rock, eventually causing the surface to collapse.

(Image: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images

28 May

Celestial scenes like this one of the Milky Way are getting rarer by the day. Light pollution overwhelms views of our galaxy for two-thirds of the population of the US and the majority of Europeans. But some "optically clean" oases where we can look at the stars unhindered do remain, called "Dark Sky Parks". This site in Canyonlands National Park in Utah is near one of them.

The sky here appears much as it would have done 4000 years ago, when artists in the so-called Archaic civilisation are thought to have painted the ghost-like figures on the canyon walls. No other cultural artefacts have been found, suggesting the site, known as the Great Gallery, was not used for everyday living but for special religious ceremonies.

26 May

London's Natural History Museum today invited New Scientist to take a trip into the depths of the deepest ocean and explore the bizarre life that is found there.

Their new exhibition, The Deep, takes visitors under the sea to learn about the weird and wonderful creatures that have adapted to this harsh world, including this menacing-looking Anoplogaster cornuta. Also known as' "Fangtooth", this fish has the largest teeth in relation to its body size of any fish in the ocean. It can live at depths of up to 4000 metres, and feeds mainly on other fish and squid.

The exhibition also includes the skeleton of a sperm whale, on public display for the first time, as well as new specimens, photography, video and interactive displays. The Deep opens on Friday and runs until 5 September.

Other active volcanoes around the world, including Stromboli and mount Etna in Italy, have blown smoke rings too. In 2000 Etna went through a spectacular phase that lasted several months when one of its vents created hundreds of smoke rings each day.

It's not clear how the rings form, but it is thought that they require a vent with a narrow, circular mouth, and the expulsion of gas in individual puffs at just the right velocity.

24 May 2010

Hot gas glows in visible light and X-rays in this image of N49, the remains of a stellar explosion in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory spent more than 30 hours observing the remnant, uncovering a blob of debris (lower right) hurtling through space at thousands of kilometres per second.

The object suggests the explosion may have been lopsided instead of symmetrical. N49 is an estimated 5000 years old and is thought to have been forged in an explosion about twice as energetic as the average supernova.

20 May 2010

Blood is thicker than water, but that's just the half of it. As this picture shows, zoom in and you'll see it's made up of billions of tiny cells and particles that whirl, stagnate and interact to produce complex flow patterns.

Now Simone Melchionna at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, and colleagues have created software, running on a vast supercomputer, that uses a detailed heart scan to model an individual's cardiovascular system. Such models might allow heart problems – such as plaques forming on the artery walls that disturb blood flow – to be detected before they become dangerous.

(Image: LLCB/EPFL Laboratory of Multiscale Modeling of Materials)

19 May 2010

This rare African water lily – thought to be the smallest in existence – has been brought back from the brink of extinction by horticulturalists at Kew Gardens in London.

Carlos Magdalena, known as Kew's "code-breaker", ran a series of trials to work out Nymphaea thermarum's ideal growing conditions. "Now we have over 30 healthy baby plants growing here," says Magdalena. "If the natural flow of water in its historic location [in Rwanda] can be restored, plants grown at Kew can then be reintroduced into the wild."

The new simulation maps the explosion from the first milliseconds after its onset until 3 hours later, following material from a few hundred metres to tens of millions of kilometres.

This sequence follows the outward mixing of elements in the supernova from two different perspectives, taken at 350 seconds after core ignition (top) and 9000 seconds (bottom). The surfaces denote the outermost radial locations of carbon (green), oxygen (red), and nickel (blue) as they are ejected from the core.

(Image: MPA)

12 May 2010

Would Martians be as vulnerable to ash clouds as we Earthlings? As volcanic ash from Iceland continues to disrupt European air travel, ancient blown ash has been spotted on the surface of Mars.

The Mars Express orbiter photographed the ash in the Meridiani Planum region, near the Martian equator. The dark volcanic material was laid down many years ago, and north-easterly winds have blown the stuff out of a 50-kilometre-wide crater. Its orientation may provide clues about the prevailing wind direction in the region.

(Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum))

10 May 2010

This image, by Tom Wundrak, was taken in Franconia, Germany. "Finding the right layout for all the elements – the close-up foliage and the distant silhouettes of the trees – was the main task here, as I wanted to achieve an asymmetrical, well-balanced composition from a particular perspective," he said of his entry.

The competition is now entering its fourth year. It is open to amateur and professional photographers alike from around the globe.

The dome will have to be positioned by remote-controlled robots and operate on the seabed 1500 metres down. The device is meant to funnel the oil to the surface, allowing it to be collected and taken away by tankers.

(Image: Patrick Kelley/US coastguard)

6 May 2010

This is a seed cathedral: a 20-metre-tall, £25 million shrine to botany and international diplomacy. It is the British government's gift to the Shanghai World Expo, which opened in China on Saturday.

When viewed from the outside, the building – designed by UK architect Thomas Heatherwick – bristles with 60,600 8-metre-long acrylic spikes, which sway when the wind blows. Inside, the tips of the rods display 6000 varieties of seed. During the day, sunlight passes through the tubes, illuminating the seeds inside. "Visitors pass through this tranquil, contemplative space, surrounded by the tens of thousands of points of light illuminating the seeds," the team behind the pavilion say.

27 April 2010

An explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig last week sank the facility, with 11 people missing and presumed dead. Now 190 kilolitres of oil a day is escaping into the Gulf of Mexico from two separate leaks and is heading towards the Mississippi delta. It's the worst offshore oil-rig spill in the US for 40 years.

The slick, covering more than 2500 square kilometres of ocean, is the lighter-coloured area in the lower right of this photograph, taken by NASA's Aqua satellite.

The US coastguard now classes the spill as a serious environmental problem. The rig's operator, BP, is attempting to seal the leaks with underwater robots. Louisiana is in line for the slick as it moves north.

(Image: MODIS Rapid Response Team/NASA)

26 April 2010

A 7-metre-long, 250-kilogram model sperm whale is hoisted into the main entrance of the Natural History Museum, London, where it will be a centrepiece exhibit of The Deep exhibition, which promises to take visitors on an immersive voyage into the planet's final frontier, exploring the mysteries of the deep sea.

The model will be displayed alongside a giant squid to illustrate a battle between the two big beasts of the ocean. Sperm whales feed on giant squid and can dive to great depths to catch their prey, although little is known about how they capture their food.

(Image: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

23 April 2010

This electron micrograph shows a glassy fragment of volcanic ash found by the British Geological Survey in Loughborough, UK, on Tuesday. The particle is from the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, and clouds of similar flecks have been the cause of travel chaos across much of Europe.

22 April 2010

Typographer Craig Ward of New York media agency Grey has taken an organic approach to his latest commission – he's grown the work in a culture dish. For the job – a cover piece for Creative Review magazine – he grew live cells in a mould, shaping them into the required letter.

Simple though it sounds, his "cell-level typography" technique was far from easy. At first it looked as though the project would be unaffordable, with universities offering the required skills and equipment for £250,000. But by collaborating with Frank Conrad, a "friend of a friend" who happened to be an immunologist at the University of Colorado, Denver, he was able to get to work.

Initially Chinese hamster ovary cells were selected for use, but they weren't strong enough to withstand the process, dying "en masse, every time we went to check them", says Ward. The solution was to use pollen cells, which not only stood up to the pressures exerted upon them, but also had a "graphic" style of their own.

(Image: Craig Ward/Frank Conrad/Creative Review)

19 April 2010

Lightning has long been associated with volcanic eruptions, as seen in this spectacular example two days ago at Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. The volcano is currently spewing ash into the atmosphere and causing global travel chaos.

As plumes of ash and rock rise into the air, oppositely charged particles separate into layers, and eventually the difference between layers is great enough for a charge to jump the gap, releasing energy in a flash of lightning.

14 April 2010

This wall – part of a new building at the construction site of the 2010 International Floral Expo in Taipei, Taiwan – was built with recycled plastic bottles.

The nine-storey exhibition hall is made from 1.5 million bottles that have been turned into bricks. It is designed to withstand earthquakes.

The building is one of 14 exhibition halls, each with its own unique style, built for the festival, which is "dedicated to showcasing notable achievements in horticulture, science, and environmental protection technology".

(Image: Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty)

7 April 2010

Seven years of research have culminated in an 87-minute flight. That's the length of time the Solar Impulse HB-SIA was airborne during its maiden flight over Switzerland this morning.

Solar Impulse is designed to be the first solar-powered plane to carry a pilot and enough battery storage to power flight through the night. Spectators watched as the craft, which has a wingspan of 63 metres, climbed to 1200 metres (4000 feet), performed various manoeuvres and landed safely.

The aim is to fly long-haul by next year. A non-stop round-the-world flight is the ultimate goal.

(Image: Solar Impulse)

6 April 2010

Astronaut Soichi Noguchi took this snap from the International Space Station yesterday – and then tweeted it.

The green glow is the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, and Noguchi was watching it from the Cupola – the observation module of the ISS – which was fitted earlier this year.

The aurora is made when charged subatomic particles from the sun interact with our atmosphere. A particularly strong solar ejection hit Earth yesterday, causing dazzling auroras.

You can tell how fast the ISS is moving by the "jump to hyperspace" lines made by the stars in the background.

(Image: Soichi Noguchi)

30 March 2010

Pacman has been spotted on the surface of one of the solar system's most striking moons.

Saturn's moon Mimas has previously been compared with the Death Star because of a large scar on its surface called the Herschel crater. Now NASA's Cassini probe created the best temperature map yet of the moon, using data collected during a fly-by in February. It reveals a pattern that resembles Pacman eating a dot centred on the distinctive crater.

It's unclear what has caused the pattern. "We suspect the temperatures are revealing differences in texture on the surface," says John Spencer at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

25 March 2010

London Zoo today invited New Scientist to take a sneak preview of its latest creation – a 300-square-metre living rainforest in the heart of the city. Opening on Saturday, the Rainforest Life exhibition replicates a rainforest habitat for many exotic species, including these two curious red titi monkeys.

Built inside a giant "biodome", the rainforest remains constantly humid and at a warm 27 °C, and many animals are free to mingle with visitors. Species were carefully chosen for their temperament and ability to co-exist with each other and with humans.

(Image: Dave Stock)

24 March 2010

It's not hard to guess from its picture why Cnemaspis neangthyi remained unknown to zoology for so long.

This camouflaged gecko was discovered as recently as June 2007 in the rocky foothills of the Cardamom mountains of Cambodia, during a survey of reptiles and amphibians by Fauna & Flora International.

On inspection, it turns out to be quite distinctive. Coloured olive-green with light, paired, paravertebral blotches containing central black dots, it has a distinct light-green chevron marking on the nape.

Its unique colouration and scale characteristics have earned it the status of a new member of the Cnemapsis genus.

The south-western Cardamom mountains are home to at least 62 threatened animals and 17 threatened tree species, many of them unique to a region facing growing development pressures.

(Image: Dr Lee Grismer)

23 March 2010

Artist Nicolas García Uriburu has coloured the waters of La Matanza-Riachuelo river in Buenos Aires, Argentina – one of the most contaminated rivers in the world – green to mark International Water Day. The protest, in collaboration with Greenpeace, was aimed at raising awareness that authorities are making little progress in cleaning the waters.

Alongside the mounds of plastic trash, bubbling methane gas and sewage, the river contains chemical and heavy metal discharge coming from up to 65 neighbouring factories pumping an average of 82,000 cubic metres of untreated industrial waste into the waters.

Argentina's supreme court has ordered the national, provincial and city government to clean the basin, but little has happened. Greenpeace has complained that 20 months on from the judgment, no policies with specific goals and deadlines have been implemented. The plan also lacks sound environmental grounds, as the water quality parameters do not cover dangerous substances.

(Image: Greenpeace)

23 March 2010

Over the past 1000 years, Christ and his 12 disciples have been enjoying steadily larger meals in their "Last Supper", an analysis of 52 famous paintings of the event, including this one by Leonardo da Vinci completed in 1498, has revealed. Portion sizes, plate sizes and bread sizes have grown respectively by 69, 66 and 23 per cent reveals Brian Wansink of Cornell University.

22 March 2010

SpaceShipTwo, the craft being developed by Virgin Galactic to ferry paying customers to the edge of space, took to the skies for the first time today. Renamed the VSS Enterprise during its unveiling in December, SpaceShipTwo reached an altitude of 13.7 km slung under its carrier jet, Eve. The nearly three-hour "captive carry" flight will be followed over the next two years or so by glide tests and then powered flight tests. When the first commercial flights start sometime after that, the spaceship will be released at an altitude of 15 km, where it will fire a rocket to take six passengers to an altitude of about 100 km.

In this image taken just before the two craft landed in Mojave, California, the spaceship sits between the two fuselages of the carrier jet and casts a triangular shadow on the runway. (Image: Mark Greenberg)

11 March 2010

It's an enduring image: the Victorian gentleman beetle collector, bumbling through the woods with his net, catching specimens. On seeing a goliath beetle flying in the canopy, however, one 19th-century collector resorted to a less romantic method: he blasted the insect out of the sky with a shotgun.

His unconventional specimen-capture technique was forgotten until a beetle curator at London's Natural History Museum became puzzled by small circular holes in the cuticle of a goliath beetle (Goliathus goliatus) in the collection. The museum's forensic scientist, Heather Bonney, X-rayed the insect and discovered a shotgun pellet still inside the beetle (it's in the left "shoulder" of the beetle in this image).

In true CSI style, Bonney went further. She found that the entry wounds in the wing cases don't match the holes in the wings, proving the insect was in flight when it met its end. And because the animal was shot in its back, it must have been flying upside down at the moment it was shot. Goliath beetles, which live in African rainforests, are among the largest beetles in the world, but have remarkable aerobatic abilities: not that they helped this unfortunate insect.

A new exhibition opening today at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK, invites visitors to view mathematical creations "through the eyes of mathematics". This "lemon" is actually a visual representation of an algebraic surface.

Curated by the Oberwolfach Mathematical Research Institute in Germany, the interactive exhibition brings together visualisations, installations, virtual reality and 3D objects with their theoretical background in algebraic geometry and singularity theory.

Trained staff are on hand to help the less mathematically minded and to give insights into theoretical concepts.

(Image: Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach)

4 March 2010

This robot is designed to explore the ways that babies learn to crawl. Weighing 3.5 kilograms, and 50 centimetres from head to toe, M3-neony has software that can experiment randomly with its 22 "muscles" to learn the consequences of its actions and build up coordinated patterns of movement.

The robot's body has 90 touch sensors, twin microphone "ears", cameras, and acceleration and gyro sensors. They allow the robot to connect the signals sent to its muscles with the consequences of its movements. M3-neony will be used by researchers at the Japanese Science and Technology Agency to test theories about how we learn to move around as babies.

(Image: Sankei/Getty Images)

1 March 2010

Artist Alistair McClymont's piece The Limitations of Logic and the Absence of Absolute Certainty recreates the conditions needed for a tornado to form. Alistair uses a number of fans to create a pressure differential and generate spin, then adds fine water vapour – effectively a cloud that makes the air vortex visible.

His aim is to recapture the childlike fascination that we get when we explore things that are new or unknown. A tornado is a rare phenomenon that can require sophisticated techniques and technologies to measure and understand, but this work places a scaled-down version on public display. The artist encourages viewers to interact with it: "The tornado is built with no sides, allowing users to touch and walk through the tornado. The air inside the tornado moves fast enough to feel its physical presence."

The work will be on display at Le Laboratoire in Paris, France, on Wednesday. It will then move to the Schwartz Gallery, London on 24 March.

(Image: Alistair McClymont)

24 February 2010

The map, pictured here, shows heat emanating from a strip no more than 1 kilometre wide around the fissure, or 'tiger stripe', with the highest temperatures coming from a zone just tens of metres across. Yellow is warmest and violet coldest in the coloured portion of the image, which reveals temperatures warmer than -93 °C.

Such maps will help settle a nagging question: Does liquid water lie beneath the moon's surface, providing a potential habitat for life? That is one possible explanation for the plumes of water vapour that spew from the tiger stripes, although the jets could instead come from warm ice that changes directly from solid to gas.

(Image: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SWRI/SSI)

23 February 2010

The space shuttle Endeavour makes an S-turn during its meteor-like atmospheric re-entry after its latest mission on Sunday. Astronaut Soichi Noguchi took the picture from the International Space Station, looking out of the newly installed observation deck known as the Cupola, which was brought to the ISS by Endeavour and fitted in a series of space walks by its crew.

S-turns are a series of banking manoeuvres used to slow the shuttle during re-entry and as it begins its final approach.

(Image: Soichi Noguchi/NASA)

18 February 2010

Terry Virts, pilot of the space shuttle Endeavour, opens the windows of the International Space Station's newly installed observation deck, giving spacewalkers Robert Behnken and Nicholas Patrick a sneak peek inside the station's room with a view.

From orbit 320 kilometres above Earth, the cupola's fully opened windows look down on the Sahara desert. Apart from providing spectacular views, the room is intended to enable crew members to operate the robotic arms on the station as well as monitor the approach of supply ships.

(Image: NASA)

16 February 2010

Curious: the Craft of Microscopy is a new exhibition at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, London. It traces the history of microscopy and scientific discovery through a range of fascinating slides, some dating back to the 18th century

Found objects are the starting point for Suzanna Edwards's project, with the uncovering of a set of beautifully preserved Victorian slides in the back of a south London second-hand shop. Using optical instruments from the earliest Culpepper microscope (1720 – 1738) to a modern high-power scanning electron microscope, the artist looks at each of the slides in turn and produces a stunning selection of images that document how developments in microscopy have changed the way we see the world.

The exhibition brings together the tools of discovery – the microscopes, many never been seen in public before – with their study subjects, the slides and the magnified images that are the fruits of their labours. The exhibition runs until the 3 July 2010.

(Image: Suzanna Edwards)

12 February 2010

This mosquito has been shot with a laser during tests of a new anti-malaria measure developed by patent portfolio company Intellectual Ventures.

Engineers, some veterans of the US anti-ballistic-missile programme, are working on what they call a "photonic fence" that will use cameras and lasers to detect mosquitoes from a distance and then shoot them down automatically. Solar-powered photonic fences could be installed around homes and other buildings to spare people at least some bites.

One question the current research is addressing is just how much power is needed to kill a mosquito. Heating one enough to damage its DNA – but not make it smoke, like the one pictured – may be sufficient.

11 February 2010

The ancestor of a modern spider that dwells under cacti and rocks in the US south-west and the Caribbean has been discovered, immaculately fossilised, in 165-million-year old rocks in northern China.

The discovery of Eoplectreurys gertshi pushes the evolution of Plectreurid spiders back about 120 million years and suggests they were more widespread in the past than previously thought, says a team led by Paul Selden at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

The body plan of the fossilised spiders closely resembles that of today's Plectreurids, suggesting that little evolutionary change has occurred since the Jurassic.

5 February 2010

On the plus side, there's vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), the core of several promising new vaccines. Then there's rabies, among the deadliest viruses known.

It has never before been clear how these viruses' three structural proteins and RNA genome come together to form their bullet shape. Now, using ultra-fine electron microscopy, Z. Hong Zhou at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues have shown that the RNA and proteins wind together in a precise order, starting at the top of the bullet, to form two nested helices.

4 February 2010

The object P/2010 A2 has a long dust trail like a comet. But this Hubble Space Telescope image, taken on 29 January, shows a strange X-shaped feature that is unlike the smooth dust streams found around normal comets, bolstering the case that P/2010 A2 is the detritus of a collision between two asteroids. Read more

(Image: NASA/ESA/D. Jewitt/UCLA)

4 February 2010

Meet artist Roseline de Thelin's fibre-optic family. The ephemeral beings are made out of strands of fibre optic cable, nicked at carefully chosen places to let the light leak out. Thelin uses a computer program to help her map out the 3D structure of the image she wants to recreate, marking where she needs to cut into the cable and how deep.

Thelin is showcasing her art at Kinetica, the art fair that celebrates all things techno, electro and kinetic. Other highlights include a theremin ensemble, a homeless robot and an orchestral electric milk float. The fair runs from 5 to 7 February at the Ambika P3 Space in central London.

(Image: Ray Tang/Rex Features)

2 February 2010

NASA's Mini-RF instrument, part of a radar mapping and communication mission carried on two lunar satellites, has imaged this unusual, asymmetric crater in Mare Nubium, a large, dark, basaltic plain on the moon.

It shows a bright pattern of ejected material all around the crater except for one sector – the darker area. Laboratory experiments suggest that this pattern was caused by a very low-angle, oblique impact, coming from the direction of the excluded zone. To the left of the image is the large Kies crater, which is 5 kilometres across.

(Image: NASA)

30 January 2010

At 10:23 am today in central London, a group of homeopathy sceptics, led by English author, comedian and presenter Dave Gorman, took part in a worldwide synchronised "overdose" to demonstrate to the public that homeopathic remedies, the product of a scientifically unfounded 18th-century ritual, are nothing more than sugar pills.

The law of similars states that something which causes your symptoms will also cure them; the law of Infinitesimals claims that diluting a substance makes it more potent; and the law of succession states that tapping the mixture also increases potency.

Major retailers still sell homeopathic products despite a lack of evidence of any benefits.

The 10:23 campaign aims to raise public awareness about the realities and put pressure on homeopathy retailers.

(Image: Dave Stock)

29 January 2010

Computational sociology student Samuel Arbesman from Harvard University has created a "route map" of the Milky Way based on the London Underground subway map. By simplifying the "vast and complex interconnections" of the Milky Way, the map is "an attempt to approach our galaxy with a bit more familiarity than usual".

On his schematic representation, each line corresponds to an arm of the galaxy, and the "stations", which are thousands of light years apart, show important "destinations" such as stars, nebulae and other astronomical objects. Samuel has purposely omitted the Earth to show that we "aren't the centre of the universe".

The map is not intended to be accurate: Arbesman sees it as a "useful shorthand for our place in the Milky Way, [making] the important sights and inconceivable distances a bit less daunting".

(Image: NTI Media/Rex Features)

28 January 2010

What would you expect to find inside a huge abandoned gas tank? Mice, maybe, the usual flotsam perhaps, but probably not the world's largest sculpture of the moon. But travel to Gasometer Oberhausen near Dusseldorf, Germany and that's exactly what you will find. Until the end of this year, the 116-metre-tall tower is home to an 25-metre-wide "moon balloon", onto which images are projected.

The installation shows all of the phases of the moon; visitors can take a glass elevator to the top of the tower and look down on it. The sculpture was made by artist Wolfgang Volz and is part of the Out of This World: Wonders of the solar system exhibit.

(Image: Gasometer Oberhausen/Sven Siebenmorgen)

27 January 2010

A chimpanzee at Edinburgh Zoo in the UK uses a camera – encased in a chimp-proof box – to shoot video footage as part of a behavioural study by PhD student Betsy Herrelko from the University of Stirling.

The Chimpcam project is a collaboration between the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, the University of Stirling, the BBC's Natural History Unit and Animal Planet. Not only do the chimps get to film themselves, they can also watch themselves on monitors placed within the enclosure. Of particular interest to the researchers is whether or not the chimps recognise themselves on the screens and respond by choosing what they want to watch.

The results appear in a Natural World documentary, broadcast today in the UK at 20:00 on BBC2.

(Image: Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty)

20 January 2010

The vast cloud known as the Cat's Paw nebula lies about 5500 light years away in the direction of the constellation Scorpius, at the centre of the Milky Way.

Viewed from Earth, it covers about the same amount of sky as our moon. This stunning new image of the nebula was created by the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument at the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

The final picture combines images taken using blue, green and red filters, as well as a filter tailored to let through the light of glowing hydrogen. The red light comes predominantly from hydrogen gas glowing under the intense glare of hot young stars.

(Image: ESO)

Shedding light on the academy

The buildings of the University of Cambridge have been illuminated with images of galaxies, fruit flies and plant cells in a spectacular light show to celebrate the end of the institution's 800th year.

The colourful display, entitled Transforming Tomorrow, was designed by light artist Ross Ashton. It focused on the research taking place at the university.

This reworking of Venus and Cupid in a Landscape by the 16th-century artist Palma Vecchio was projected onto the university's Senate House as part of a display exploring the interaction between art and science.

(Image: Geoffrey Robinson/Rex Features)

14 January 2010

This may look like a close-up of a hairy chin, but it’s actually the surface of Mars. The black stubble-like structures are avalanches of sand and red dust triggered by the sublimation of carbon dioxide from a solid to a gas at the beginning of the Martian summer.

14 January 2010

After years of precision work, the robotic arm on NASA's Mars rover Spirit may soon have to do some heavy lifting. Spirit's view of the Martian landscape (shown here) has not changed much since the rover became stuck in a sand trap in May 2009. But with winter descending on Spirit's location, engineers are racing to drive the solar-powered rover out of the trap. Only four of the rover's six wheels are working, and they have gotten little traction against the loose soil.

To improve the chances of escape, the rover team is considering using Spirit's robotic arm – which normally scrapes rocks and takes microscopic images – to help sculpt the ground in front of the rover's single working front wheel. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech)

13 January 2010

This image is toast. Patterns are burned into bread, which when arranged make up the image. This is then sealed in resin to complete the final piece.

Artist David Reimondo's unusual approach helps him explore the human condition, he says: the bread symbolises the human body and the burn marks "can be read as tattoos meant to aid the viewer in understanding the underlying psychology".

Other works in the series include images of unborn fetuses, spermatozoa, DNA and computer equipment.

12 January 2010

This is the rarely seen zodiacal light, a triangular glow visible only in night skies free of overpowering moonlight and light pollution.

Zodiacal light is sunlight reflected by dust particles between the sun and Earth, and is best seen close to sunrise or sunset. The celestial glow spreads over the same band of the sky as the constellations of the zodiac.

The image was taken at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile, facing west some minutes after the sun had set. A sea of clouds has settled in the valley below La Silla, which sits at an altitude of 2400 metres.

(Image: ESO/Y. Beletsky)

8 January 2010

Take a look at our universe's infancy. This is a simulation of the cosmos shortly after the big bang, as the density of dark and ordinary matter fluctuates before condensing into an arrangement more like that of today.

The simulation was performed using a universe simulator developed at Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, on a graphics supercomputer called Eureka. The San Diego Supercomputer Center in California also collaborated on the project. It modelled a volume of the universe around 1 billion light years cubed and took over 4 million CPU hours to complete.

5 January 2010

Talk about "fruit of the sea": this newly discovered crab discovered on the coast of Taiwan is coloured like a strawberry, with reddish hue and white spots. Ho Ping-ho of the National Taiwan Ocean University found two of them on the beach of the country's southern Kenting National Park. The discovery will appear in the journal Crustaceana.

(Image: National Taiwan Ocean University/Getty)

5 January 2010

The guts of a star torn to shreds by a black hole appear as a bright blue dot in the upper-left part of this image, which combines data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Magellan telescopes in Las Campanas, Chile.

Stars that venture too close to a black hole get pulled apart by its gravity, producing flares in X-rays and ultraviolet light detectable from Earth. A few such events have been found previously around supermassive black holes millions of times as massive as the sun.

Now, astronomers have spotted the first strong evidence for a star shredded by a middleweight black hole. The black hole is thought to weigh thousands of times as much as the sun and is found in a so-called globular cluster of stars in the galaxy NGC 1399 (whose bright central region is seen near the centre of the image).

(Image: NASA/CXC/UA/J Irwin et al/STScI)

22 December 2009

This beauty is a newly discovered plant species yielding indigo dye. It forms one of the new plant species announced today by the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London.

Discovered in Zimbabwe, Indigofera serpentinicola Schrire is among 11 of 14 newly discovered indigo species that are highly localised and threatened with extinction. Botanists at Kew believe the bright pink colour of its flowers is caused by the metal-rich environment it grows in.

Coinciding with Kew's 250th anniversary, the haul of new species includes 38 orchids, 24 palms, seven wild coffees and a gigantic rainforest tree from Cameroon, 42 metres high and with a trunk 1 metre wide.

(Image: Kew Gardens)

18 December 2009

This is the first glint of sunlight to be seen by human eyes from a lake on Saturn's moon Titan – although it comes to us via NASA's Cassini orbiter.

The reflection comes from a sprawling northern lake called Kraken Mare, which spans an area larger than the Caspian Sea.

Titan has dozens of lakes, which are thought to be full of liquid methane, ethane and other hydrocarbons that may make a hearty soup for life.

Cassini had already confirmed that there is liquid on the moon's southern hemisphere. But until recently, the northern hemisphere of the moon has been swaddled in winter darkness, and this glint of sunlight is the first sign of liquid there. It also suggests 1100-kilometre-long Kraken Mare is the moon's largest lake. The previous record-holder is a 235-kilometre-wide southern lake called Ontario Lacus.

(Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/DLR)

9 December 2009

Previously unseen walls and curlicues in a mysterious hexagon-shaped feature on Saturn's north pole are revealed in this new image by the Cassini spacecraft.

The strange hexagonal structure, which spans a distance wider than two Earths, has remained largely unchanged since it was first discovered by NASA's Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. Cassini snapped this image earlier this year, as winter in Saturn's northern hemisphere came to a close, and the region was once again illuminated by sunlight.

A jet stream is thought to whip around the hexagon at 100 metres per second, but scientists are still not sure what gives rise to the long-lived shape, or where it gets and releases its energy.

(Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

8 December 2009

What does the amount of carbon dioxide you are responsible for emitting each month look like? If you live in an industrialised country then, according to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, it's about 1 tonne. At sea-level pressure, that would fill a three-storey house or a 8.2-cubic-metre cube.

To help people visualise the scale of their individual carbon footprint, a "CO2 cube" of this size has been unveiled on St Jørgen's Lake in Copenhagen, Denmark, outside the city's Tycho Brahe planetarium.

Created by art impresarios Millennium Art, the cube is also a giant video screen displaying art, live news and environmental data streams from around the world. The cube is made from 12 interlocking shipping containers floating on a barge: Christophe Cornubert, an architect based in Los Angeles who designed the cube, sees it as resonating "with the local shipping industry while signifying global consumption, yet reflecting the sustainable solution of re-use".

The cube can be seen in Copenhagen until 18 December.

(Image: Obscura Digital)

8 December 2009

Call it the Ultra-Ultra Deep Field. The Hubble Space Telescope has used its new Wide Field Camera 3 to take the deepest near-infrared image of the universe ever made, revealing galaxies as they were about 600 million years after the big bang. The image was taken in the same region of sky as Hubble's "Ultra Deep Field", which in 2004 became the deepest visible-light image, showing galaxies 700 million years after the big bang.

Wide Field Camera 3 is two to three times as sensitive as the near-infrared camera used to take previous Hubble deep-field images, NICMOS. (Image: NASA/ESA/G. Illingworth/UCO/Lick Observatory/UCSC/R. Bouwens/Leiden University/HUDF09 Team)

3 December 2009

The image shows the mass of proliferating cells that make up a medullablastoma, an aggressive brain tumour most often seen in children. A gene called Atoh1 is overactive within the cancer cells, which are coloured green in the image.

Until now, efforts to unpick the gene's role in brain cancer have met with little success. Mice engineered to lack Atoh1 die before birth, because the gene is critical for growth of the cerebellum, where the cancer originates.

To get around this hurdle, Huda Zoghbi's team at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, engineered mice whose Atoh1 gene could be switched off after birth.

Removing Atoh1 prevented the development of medullablastomas. Drugs that target Atoh1 or its biological pathway in humans may thwart these tumours, the researchers say.

2 December 2009

This firework display is actually a magnified image of brain cells taken from a fetus as part of research on brain toxicity. The green streaks are neurons supported by red-stranded astrocytes, with the cellular DNA within visible in blue. It is one of 30 images of human cells vying to win this year's micrograph competition run by the instrument manufacturer GE Healthcare.

Viewers can vote until 6 January for their favourite images, which range from Jackson Pollock-like shots of neurons to Monet-style "shoals of fish" that are actually human fat cells. Voters will each receive free calendars of last year's images. The three winners – one each from North America, Europe and Asia – will visit New York and have their pictures displayed in Times Square.

(Image: GE Healthcare)

30 November 2009

This is the world's smallest species of orchid. It's 2.1 millimetres wide and its transparent petals are just one cell thick.

One orchid discovered by Jost in Ecuador was so small that, "it looked like a piece of dirt at first", he says. According to Dr Calaway H. Dodson, more than 3,700 orchid species reside in Ecuador.

(Image: Lou Jost)

27 November 2009

This mean-looking robot has one purpose in mind: to play table tennis against a human competitor, and win. It is the third incarnation of Vietnamese firm TOSY's TOPIO – or TOSY Ping-pong Playing Robot – which has been in development since 2005.

TOPIO 3.0 uses a pair of high-speed cameras to track the ball. Its motor-controlled body can quickly twist and turn through 39 degrees, including 7 degrees in each arm and 6 in each leg, to position itself ready to return the ball.

Video footage suggests TOPIO 1.0 fell some way short of ping-pong playing perfection – visitors to the International Robot Exhibition 2009 in Tokyo this week had the opportunity to try their luck against the latest version.

(Image: Sutton-Hibbert/Rex Features)

26 November 2009

We now know for sure that there are tsunami on the sun. This image shows one rippling across the solar surface, in grey on the right, and an exploding plasma cloud called a coronal mass ejection (CME), in green.

The tsunami, which are known as "fast-mode magneto-hydrodynamical" waves, were first spotted by NASA in 1997. Yet some suggested they could be shadows cast by CMEs or image artefacts.

In February, sunspot 11012 erupted, which caused a CME and sent a hot plasma tsunami rolling millions of kilometres across the sun's surface. A pair of NASA spacecraft called STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) recorded the wave from two different angles in space. This allowed a much clearer picture of the event than previous images, which had only been taken from one angle.

(Image: S. Patsourakis, George Mason University)

24 November 2009

A chameleon previously unknown to science has been found in a forest in Tanzania – after a snake spat it out.

Andrew Marshall of the University of York and his colleagues were surveying monkeys in the Magombera forest in 2005 when they saw the snake devouring the chameleon.

"I was out there doing conservation research when I came across this snake. It saw me and fled, and as it did so spat out a chameleon," Marshall told the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. "I took photos and showed them to a local herpetologist, who instantly recognised that it was a new species."

23 November 2009

From a transparent sea cucumber that swims to a deep-sea worm that feasts on crude oil, still more weird animals has been found living in the darkness far below the ocean's surface.

The Census of Marine Life published its record of animals living between 200 metres and 5000 metres down yesterday, bringing the number of known marine species living in darkness to 17,650.

Expeditions to the mid-Atlantic ridge this year have collected this strange example of a deep-sea octopus known as "Dumbo". The creature flaps its large ear-like fins to swim. Nine species of the octopus were collected this year, one of which is thought to be new to science.

Other species added to the list this year include examples of a worm that feasts on whale bones in Antarctica. Seventeen species of the worm, Osedax, had been found already, but none so far south.

Previous finds include a transparent sea cucumber, Enypniastes (PDF), which was seen on a 2007 expedition in the Gulf of Mexico at a depth of 2750 metres.

The same expedition also discovered a deep-sea tubeworm that dines on crude oil.

(Image: David Shale/MAR-ECO/Census of Marine Life)

17 November 2009

These massive tree stumps, originally from Ghana, are among 10 on display in London's Trafalgar Square this week. If the trees were upright and intact, they would rival nearby Nelson's column at 50 metres or so in height.

The stumps have been placed in the landmark square by the artist Angela Palmer, whose installation Ghost Forest is intended to illustrate the connection between deforestation and climate change. Palmer says the trees' missing trunks represent the way that deforestation has reduced the natural world's resilience to climate change.

Deforestation has to date accounted for a greater share of the global "carbon budget" than the carbon emissions of the European Union and US combined, and it continues to account for about 15 per cent of the world's total carbon emissions. Ninety per cent of Ghana's rainforest has been lost over the past 50 years.

Eljamel specialises in neurological surgery, and this visualisation allowed him and his team to remove the tumour through a surgical corridor without affecting the patient’s speech, motor or sensory functions.

The image was judged for its aesthetic qualities, originality, informational content, technical proficiency and visual impact.

(Image: Sam Eljamel/University of Dundee)

13 November 2009

This image of the sun coral, Tubastrea aurea, is part of a new and unique interactive bank of photographs and educational material exploring marine life from the Red Sea to the Great Barrier Reef.

Using Google Earth, visitors can also see images of marine species as they run their mouse over different locations.

Husband-and-wife underwater photographers Myron and Nicole Wang have donated their entire collection of more than 5000 pictures of fish, corals, invertebrates and other marine life, taken over four decades, to the University of Miami, which set up the database. So far around 1000 of these images are available on the website.

(Image: Myron and Nicole Wang/DAMSL)

6 November 2009

The world's largest fish - a whale shark – is seen here off the north coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico.

The conference aims to promote conservation and climate stabilisation in wilderness areas.

A biodiversity hotspot, the Yucatán Peninsula is threatened by high rates of deforestation and biodiversity loss due to human activities, including population growth and unsustainable industrial and agricultural development.

It is hoped that WILD9 can help improve the wilderness protection policies in the Yucatán Peninsula and elsewhere.

(Image: Brian Skerry / International League of Conservation Photographers)

4 November 2009

This spectacular new Envisat image shows the rugged coast of eastern Greenland.

The National Park, visible along the left of the image, is the world’s largest and most northerly nature reserve.

The park covers more than 970,000 square kilometres, larger than many countries, yet because of its remoteness very few people live there. Most temporary residents are scientists, including those working at Zackenberg Research Station and on the shifting Greenland ice sheet at the Greenland Environmental Observatory.

Also visible in the image is the Kong Oscar fjord, and just out of shot south of this is the Scoresby Sund fjord, the longest in the world.

(Image: ESA)

2 November 2009

An oil rig off the coast of Australia that has been spewing oil into the Timor Sea for the past 10 weeks caught fire this weekend during efforts to plug the leak.

An underwater breach at the West Atlas rig, which lies 200 kilometres off the north coast of Australia, is leaking 400 barrels of oil and gas into the sea each day.

To stem the flow, the rig's operator is injecting "heavy mud" – mud laced with a heavy mineral – into the well. On Sunday, however, this operation only succeeded in triggering the huge fire.

A spokesperson for the company – PTTEP Australasia, based in Perth, Western Australia – has said that the only way to kill the fire is to plug the leak, so workers plan to continue their attempts to pump mud into the well tomorrow.

(Image: PTTEP)

30 October 2009

On Wednesday, NASA launched the "Ares I-X", a prototype of the Ares I rocket intended to replace the space shuttle.

The first stage of the Ares I-X was a modified shuttle solid rocket booster; it used a dummy second stage.

The powered flight was to end with the burnout of the first stage, which would then separate and parachute down to be recovered, while the dummy second stage fell into the ocean.

Overall, NASA says the test was a success. But glitches with the parachute system on the first stage meant that only one of its three parachutes opened fully, according to CBS News, causing the first stage to dent (shown) when it hit the water harder than planned. (Image: United Space Alliance)

29 October 2009

Tokai Challenger, a solar-powered car from Tokai University in Tokyo, Japan, has claimed victory in the Global Green Challenge in Australia. The car is shown here passing through Glendambo, Australia.

The biennial race is simple – cars must travel the 3000-kilometre distance from Darwin to Adelaide in the shortest possible time, using only sunlight as fuel.

The race provides an opportunity for car manufacturers, solar energy scientists, designers and technology companies to test their ideas. In 2001 the competition added a "demonstration class" allowing car manufactures to race production vehicles that demonstrate "enhanced environmental credentials".

Competing over three almost faultless days the Japanese team reached speeds of up to 106 kilometres per hour. The judges are expected to verify soon that it averaged 100 kilometres per hour across the entire run.

As the Tokai Challenger passed the chequered flag, there were still 15 vehicles out of 32 entrants on the route. The race continues until Saturday.

(Image: KPA/Zuma/Rex Features)

27 October 2009

This may look like an elaborate tattoo, but it is actually a Martian windstorm.

The photo shows twisting dark trails criss-crossing with lighter coloured terrains that cover the surface of Mars. The dark trails are the result of miniature whirlwinds known as dust devils: spinning columns of warm air that rise and become visible as they pick up the loose red dust, leaving the heavier and darker-coloured sand visible beneath.

26 October 2009

The Prix Pictet is an international photography award for remarkable images that focus on environmental sustainability.

This image is part of Kander's Yangtze, The Long River series.

Focusing on the Yangtze River, which flows for 6500 kilometres across China, Nadav photographs the landscape, scenery and people that have made their lives along the banks of the river.

Awarding the prize, honorary president of the Prix Pictet, Kofi Annan, said, "The images in front of us remind us of the fragility of our planet and the damage we have already done. When we see these photographs we cannot close our eyes and remain indifferent."

22 October 2009

The winners of the 2009 Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition have been announced.

This image of an Iberian wolf landed José Luis Rodríguez the overall prize.

The Iberian wolf is a subspecies of grey wolf and inhabits the forest and plains of northern Portugal and north-western Spain. The wolf is rare, with between 1000 and 2000 thought to exist in the wild. Iberian wolves have been persecuted and hunted by humans because they can attack farms and livestock when food becomes scarce.

This image captures the "wolf's great agility and strength", says Rodríguez. It also implies a relationship with humans as the wolf jumps effortlessly over the fence into a farmer's enclosure.

Judging the image, wildlife photographer Jim Brandenburg noted that "thousands of years of history are frozen in this masterfully executed moment".

(Image: José Luis Rodríguez/Veolia Environnement Photographer of the Year 2009)

21 October 2009

Talk about a Napoleon complex. A newly discovered orb weaving spider from southern Africa has been named as the largest of its kind in the world – but males of the species are only a quarter the size of the females.

Females of Nephila komaci grow up to 3.9 centimetres long, with a leg-span of 10 to 12 centimetres. Their webs are more than a metre across. By contrast, the males are minute: the only individual described came in at just under 9 millimetres long.

The biologists who discovered the giant spider say they fear it is a threatened species as it is only known to live in the endangered biodiversity hotspots of Maputaland, South Africa, and Madagascar.

In this image the male is dwarfed by his female counterpart as he hitches a piggyback ride.

20 October 2009

It may look like a sickly octopus, but this is actually the first fruit of a US Department of Defense programme that asked for soft-bodied robots able to change shape to squeeze through small spaces.

Made at the University of Chicago, this prototype's soft body wall is made of compartments that can be flipped between rigid and flexible states, while a void at its centre can be pumped up with or emptied of air. The robot can "walk" by loosening a few of the skin compartments and letting the pumped-up central space bulge the body wall outwards. A video shows how repeating that process for a series of adjacent skin compartments can propel the robot along.

(Image: Rex Features)

19 October 2009

The level of oxygen in our atmosphere is preventing the growth of colossal creepy-crawlies.

Alexander Kaiser and his colleagues at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona, looked at X-rays (right of image) of four different species of beetle (on left). Bigger bugs find it harder to get oxygen around their bodies – which they do through tracheal tubes – because the gas has a longer way to travel. What’s more, in larger insects, a greater proportion of body mass is devoted to tracheal tubes.

The authors reckon that the abundant levels of atmospheric oxygen in the Palaeozoic era allowed insects to grow into giants. Nowadays, the oxygen levels are around two-thirds of what they were then, so beetles can only hope to grow to around 16 centimetres long.

The X-rays were taken using the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, which is the brightest X-ray in the western hemisphere.

(Image: Argonne National Laboratory)

16 October 2009

Genes involved in forming the glass skeletons of diatoms could help us create our own microscopic beauties.

Diatoms, tiny algae that live in oceans, produce a quarter of the oxygen we breathe.

13 October 2009

The discovery of more than 2000 fossilised leaves has cast new light on the ancient forests haunted 58 million years ago by Titanoboa, a giant snake 13 metres long, and first reported in February.

Recovered from the Cerrejón coal mine in northern Colombia, these leaf and pod fossils reveal the three-tiered structure of the forest, with a floor, an "understory" of shrubs, and a high canopy.

Titanoboa's neotropical world was about 3 to 5 degrees warmer than today's tropical forests, with temperatures around 30 to 32 degrees and 2.5 metres worth of annual rainfall, according to the team led by Scott Wing of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

Reporting their findings, they conclude that the neotropical forests, recovering from the events about 7 million years earlier that had wiped out the dinosaurs, were less diverse than today's counterparts.

But the trawl still includes a huge variety of plants, from beans to hibiscus.

Using an advanced technology called Hi-C, researchers were able to map genes' spatial relationships.

They found that the genome is actually organised into two separate sections.

Active genes are readily accessible, while unused stretches of DNA are parked in a denser section.

This "fractal globule" architecture (right) challenges the current "equilibrium globule" model (left), in which a highly tangled structure may separate genes.

(Image: Leonid A. Mirny / Maxim Imakaev)

7 October 2009

This piece of fabric measuring 3.4 metres by 1.2 metres was woven from gold-coloured silk drawn out of 1 million wild Madagascan golden orb spiders.

The rug has just gone on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It took four years to complete and is decorated with patterns of birds and flowers.

The spiders were collected during the rainy season from their webs on telephone wires using poles.

About 24 metres of the strongest “dragline" type silk filament were then extracted from each individual of Nephila madagascariensis. After they had been "silked", the spiders were released back into the wild.

Spiders’ silk is three times as strong as Kevlar and five times as strong as steel, but can stretch up to 40 per cent of its length. Work is under way to sequence spider genes to produce synthetic silk.

6 October 2009

Seven new species of glow-in-the-dark mushroom have been discovered by researchers in Belize, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico, bringing the world total of bioluminescent fungi to 71. Four of the species are new to science, while three were not previously known to glow.

Mycena luxaeterna, pictured here, was discovered by Dennis Desjardin of San Francisco State University and colleagues in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Desjardin says the new discoveries shed light on how luminescence evolved in fungi. "Within Mycena, the luminescent species come from 16 different lineages, which suggests that luminescence evolved at a single point and some species later lost the ability to glow," he says.

He thinks the bioluminescence attracts nocturnal animals, aiding the dispersal of spores.

1 October 2009

This image is the first visualisation from GOCE data that ESA has released.

Launched on 17 March, GOCE has been through three months of rigorous tests and is now ready to begin sending back useable data.

GOCE's onboard gradiometer instrument will measure the gravitational tug of Earth. This information will be used to produce a three-dimensional model of Earth’s gravity field and so to understand the planet's geoid – a theoretical shape which can be thought of as the surface of a global ocean at rest.

Accurate information about the geoid is essential for understanding ocean circulation and measuring sea-level change, both key players in climate.

It will also have practical applications in areas such as surveying.

(Image: ESA)

30 September 2009

Speed comes at a price for the spiral galaxy NGC 4522, which is being stripped of gas as it tears through space at more than 10 million kilometres per hour.

The galaxy is a member of the Virgo cluster, a clutch of about 2000 galaxies that sits some 60 million light years away. Hot gas lurks between the galaxies in this cluster, creating drag that tears away NGC 4522's gas, which glows a ghostly white in this Hubble Space Telescope image. The bright blue speckles are areas where new stars are forming as a result of this process.

The Blood Lamp, made by Netherlands-based designer Mike Thompson, poses just such a question.

The lamp is a single-use light bulb, filled with Luminol, a chemical used at crime scenes to reveal bloodstains.

Luminol is usually clear, but adding human blood produces a bright blue light as the liquid reacts with the oxygen-carrying pigment haemoglobin.

Mike says the single-use design, and inherent cost to the individual, means the user must "consider when light is needed the most, forcing them to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is."

23 September 2009

Residents of Sydney, Australia, awoke to an eerie red shroud over some of the city's most famous landmarks. It was caused by one of the worst storms in the city's history as high winds crossed central Australia picking up and moving dust across the country.

The storms caused chaos for commuters as roads were closed. Low visibility at the harbour cancelled ferries and flights into and out of Sydney airport were delayed, cancelled or diverted.

Similar dust storms have occurred before, most recently in October 2002 but also in April 1994, September 1968, December 1957 and January 1942, according to Bureau of Meteorology records. The severity of this storm has led many to report it as being Australia's worst in 70 years

Image: (James D. Morgan/Rex Features)

23 September 2009

Once every 14.8 years, Saturn's rings align themselves exactly edge-on to the sun, creating a rare spectacle that the Cassini spacecraft witnessed up close for the first time in August.

The low angle of illumination darkens the rings – even the brighter portion at left would be invisible here if engineers had not used computer processing to brighten them by a factor of 20 relative to the planet.

Other images taken during the rare alignment have revealed plumes of dust kicked up by meteoroids smashing into ring particles, which could help scientists estimate the erosion rate and age of the rings.

(Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

22 September 2009

This stunning new view of the Milky Way's centre was produced using an amateur telescope at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal observing site in Chile.

Astrophotographer and ESO engineer Stéphane Guisard combined more than 1200 images from a 10-centimetre telescope to create this detailed view of the galaxy's core, where a supermassive black hole lies hidden.

Dark patches of dust are silhouetted against the galaxy's bright central region across the image, and bright stars illuminate gas and dust clouds, making nebulae, on the right.

The first image, part of which is available here, was a portrait of the entire sky.

(Image: ESO/S. Brunier/S. Guisard)

18 September 2009

These newly-released thermal images capture the play of heat across the surface of the space shuttle Discovery as it returned to Earth on 11 September 2009.

They were taken from a Navy patrol aircraft, which tracked the space vehicle as it streaked past en route to Edwards Air Force base.

A total of 8 minutes of uninterrupted thermal footage was captured, recording the surface heat on the shuttle as it decelerated from Mach 19, or 6.5 kilometres per second, to just below Mach 9.

The observations will be combined with data from sensors on board the shuttle, as well as computer models.

This is the third time the HYTHIRM team has successfully captured thermal images of the space shuttle. The other two were STS-119 on 28 March (bottom left) and STS-125 on 24 May, which serviced the Hubble Space Telescope. Getting detailed information about the shuttle's heat distribution is important for evaluating the craft's safety, an issue that was highlighted by the space shuttle Columbia's destruction by heat when it re-entered the atmosphere in 2003.

(Image: NASA Langley)

26 August 2009

South Korea has launched its first space rocket. The two-stage Naro 1 lifted off from an island off the country's south coast yesterday.

The launch was only a partial success: a scientific satellite it was carrying failed to reach its intended orbit.

The satellite successfully separated from the carrier rocket, but did so only after reaching an altitude of 360 kilometres, rather than the planned 302 km.

This meant that the satellite did not follow its planned orbit route.

South Korea has previously sent satellites into space using launch vehicles and rockets from other countries.

(Image: Sipa Press / Rex Features)

17 September 2009

This pitcher plant is normally carnivorous, preying on spiders and ants. But ant densities are low in tropical mountainous forests. So pitcher plants (Nepenthes lowii) found in Borneo have had to get used to a still less appetising diet.

Pitcher plants and tree shrews have formed a relationship of mutual benefit: the shrews feed on the plant’s wax and defecate into its convenient “lavatory”, so providing the plant with 60 to 100 per cent of its nitrogen needs.

14 September 2009

GigaGalaxy Zoom is an interactive 800-million pixel panorama of the night sky, made up of nearly 1200 individual photos. Starting from a view of the entire Milky Way (the central portion of which is shown), users can zoom in to view the image using a Google Maps-style interface, getting close-up views of celestial showstoppers like the Pleiades star cluster (click here for the interactive image).

Astrophotographer Serge Brunier spent several weeks capturing images in Chile and the Canary Islands, before the raw photographs were processed by Frédéric Tapissier.

The starscape was produced in conjunction with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, as part of a project that aims to bring astronomy to the public during the International Year of Astronomy. Later in September, the ESO will release two more images, providing an even greater level of detail for armchair astronomers. (Image: Serge Brunier/Frédéric Tapissier/ESO)

10 September 2009

The evolution of a tropical butterfly infected by male-killing bacteria has been traced by scientists from Liverpool University, UK.

Greg Hurst and his colleagues analysed the DNA of museum specimens dating back to the 1800s. By comparing these genes to living specimens, they were directly able to track the arms race
between butterfly and bacterium.

But in other populations, such as those in the South Pacific, the bacteria had the upper hand, altering the butterfly sex ratio to favour females.

Hurst says, "The butterfly illustrated variety within a species and was therefore a good model for 19th century scientists studying evolution. Today we can benefit from this early interest [by using] the latest DNA technology to understand how species have evolve."

(Image: Oxford University Museum of Natural History)

7 September 2009

Chimpanzee William at Twycross Zoo, Leicestershire, UK, is helping advance genetic research by opening wide for a mouth swab.

William and other chimps were trained to cooperate, because researchers from the University of Leicester's genetics department could only obtain DNA samples from anaesthetised chimps.

As well as contributing to research into "mobile" DNA in the genomes of chimps and other primates, the chimps are also helping provide genetic information that will help guide captive breeding programmes.

(Image: University of Leicester)

4 September 2009

This is a peek into a high vacuum chamber lit by the blue fluorescent light of laser-cooled strontium atoms.

It is part of a research program attempting to make a new generation of super-accurate, portable atomic clocks.

The group at Germany's National Institute for Natural and Engineering Sciences, Braunschweig, is working on strontium-based designs, which are more compact and accurate than any before.

If sent into space, such a clock could help take more accurate measurements of the Earth's mountains, by making it easier to measure the gravitational red shift of light from our planet.

(Image: PTB)

3 September 2009

This 1961 scene, showing one of the earliest computers to have the same basic architecture as the one you're using to read this, will soon be recreated.

Volunteers have started work at the UK's National Museum of Computing to restore the WITCH computer, which ran its first program in 1951 and was only retired in 1973.

If they succeed, it will be the world's oldest working machine with the stored-program architecture that defines modern computers.

Built to work on the UK's nuclear weapons program, WITCH took over the work of human "computers".

In a man vs machine race, a mathematician using a mechanical calculator was able to keep pace with WITCH for 30 minutes before retiring exhausted. The machine kept going.

(Image: Wolverhampton Express and Star)

2 September 2009

Antarctica may be a frozen wasteland on the surface, but underneath the snow and ice are over a hundred hidden lakes of liquid meltwater.

This map was produced using lasers on NASA's ICESat satellite. As well as being a comprehensive inventory of the lakes, it shows which ones are draining and which are filling.

Warmer colours (orange and red) show the largest of the lakes, while cooler colours (green and blue) represent lakes with smaller volumes.

Purple areas show the locations of previously known, but inactive, lakes.

27 August 2009

Today the European Space Agency (ESO) has released a new image of the Trifid nebula, showing just why it is a firm favourite of astronomers, amateur and professional alike.

The nebula is named after the dark dust bands that trisect its glowing heart: "trifid" means "three-lobed". The Trifid is a rare combination of three nebula types: an emission nebula, a reflection nebula and a dark nebula.

The image was captured using the Wide-Field Imager camera attached to the 2.2-metre telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla site in northern Chile

24 August 2009

Fire and smoke illuminate the sky behind the Acropolis in Athens, as wildfires come within 20 kilometres of the Greek capital.

Authorities have declared a state of emergency in the region. The wildfire has raged since Friday, destroying homes and forcing thousands to flee.

Fanned by strong winds and temperatures of 40 °C, the blaze is the worst suffered by mainland Greece since 2007.

(Image: Milos Bicanski / Getty Images)

21 August 2009

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the orbital Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA has released this composite image of the Cat's Eye nebula. It is made with images from Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope, two of NASA's four Great Observatories.

Since it took its first image on 19 August 1999, Chandra has captured unprecedented X-ray pictures of exotic environments, helping astrophysicists understand the evolution of the cosmos.

(Image: UIUC/Y. Chu et al./NASA/HST)

20 August 2009

It looks like an oil slick, but this kaleidoscopic image is the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh, taken from thousands of metres above onboard the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite.

The Ganges Delta is the world's largest delta plain, about 350 kilometres wide along the Bay of Bengal. It is formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers.

19 August 2009

This image of a curious king penguin chick was taken by British photographer Robert Friel on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia.

The image was highly commended in the One Earth Award category, which seeks to highlight interaction between humans and the natural world.

Friel says, "I thought it merely a quirky moment, but later it became a more poignant reminder that, however brief and well-managed our visits, we are intruding on [the penguins'] environment."

The winning selection of nearly 100 images will be showcased at an exhibition opening at the Natural History Museum, London, on 23 October.

(Image: Robert Friel/Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

18 August 2009

A Delta II rocket blasts off with the US air force’s GPS IIR-21 satellite from launch complex 17A at Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 0635 Eastern Daylight Time.

The launch is the 48th and final launch of a Navstar GPS satellite on board a Delta II rocket. United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of aerospace companies Boeing and Lockheed Martin that is behind the launch, has decided to use Atlas V and Delta IV rockets instead.

The first air force Delta II GPS satellite launch occurred on 14 February 1989. With 48 launches and a 98 per cent success rate, it is one of the most successful space launch programmes in US history.

GPS is a space-based positioning system that uses a "constellation" of 24 satellites to provide precision navigation and timing information to military and civilian users worldwide.

(Image: Matt Stroshane/Getty Images)

17 August 2009

NASA has released a new high-resolution image of the 800-metre-wide Victoria crater in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars.

This area has been visited by NASA's Opportunity rover, which spent almost two years exploring the crater's rim and interior.

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

14 August 2009

With only 3000 left in the wild, tigers have never been in a tighter spot.

Only 1.7 per cent of historical tiger numbers are alive today.

Indian tigers, such as the one seen here charging the camera, could be a new focus of conservation.

New research in PLoS Genetics suggests that the most effective way to save the tiger is to focus conservation efforts on the Indian variety, which has over half of the species's genetic diversity.

Equipped with such eclectic genes, Indian tigers could be better able to adapt to future change than any other tiger on Earth.

(Image: Michael Nichols/NGS/Getty)

12 August 2009

Astronomers observe the night sky for the Perseid meteor shower at an observatory near the village of Avren, east of the Bulgarian capital Sofia.

The annual meteor shower is promising to put on a dazzling show.

Astronomers say up to 100 meteors per hour are expected to streak across the sky during the shower's peak on 12 August.

The Perseid meteor shower occurs every August, as the Earth passes through rock and dust fragments left behind by the comet Swift-Tuttle.

As these small particles collide with the Earth's atmosphere, they burn up, creating a streak of light across the sky.

(Image: AP Photo / Petar Petrov)

10 August 2009

A better understanding of the mechanisms of blood clotting could help prevent the condition known as artherosclerosis - a chronic inflammation in the walls of arteries.

The glue that holds blood clots together is really a dense matrix made of a protein called fibrin, coloured orange in this image. Fibrin scaffolds can stretch up to three times their length without breaking, yet they’re porous enough for protein-eating enzymes to snake through the scaffold once a wound has healed.

When stretched, chaotic tangles of fibrin proteins align. As this scaffold stretches further, individual protein chains unfurl and kick out adjacent water molecules, shrinking the total volume of the matrix.

It is hoped that by examining and understanding these unusual properties of fibrin and blood-clotting they can be reversed, controlled and modulated - holding huge promise for the treatment of conditions such as artherosclerosis.

6 August 2009

A villager walks through a field affected by the recent lack of rain in Lamongan, near Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia. The area has been without rain for three months now as experts expect 2009 to be an El Niño year. El Niño brings the annual rains late and causes drought in affected areas.

Forecasters are concerned that this El Niño may be the second strongest after the one in 1998 and many governments and aid agencies are taking measures to minimise the impacts.

(Image: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)

5 August 2009

The 300-million-year-old relatives of modern spiders have been brought to virtual life by 3D modelling.

30 July 2009

Dubbed the "Bare-faced Bulbul" because of the lack of feathers on its face and part of its head, it is the only example of a bald songbird in mainland Asia according to scientists. It is the first new species of bulbul – a family of about 130 species – described in Asia in over 100 years.

(Image: Iain Woxvold/University of Melbourne)

24 July 2009

A member of staff at London's Science Museum holds aloft a replica of Galileo's refracting telescope from 1610.

22 July 2009

The sky goes dark over the statue of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong in Wuhan, Hubei province as a lunar shadow moves over the city during a solar eclipse.

The longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century cast its shadow over western India, then headed for China, plunging hundreds of millions of people into temporary darkness as it passed halfway round the Earth.

In a bid to replicate the predicament that one of its rovers currently faces on Mars, NASA scientists place a test rover on a bed of soft sand.

Team members Colette Lohr (left) and Kim Lichtenberg (centre) eye the wheels digging into the soil, whilst Paolo Bellutta enters the next driving command at the In-Situ Instrument Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

NASA's Mars Rover Spirit is currently stuck in a soft soil patch called "Troy" on Mars.

It is hoped that these ground test simulations can help NASA figure out possible manoeuvres to free Sprit.

(Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech)

30 June 2009

On Friday the Solar Impulse was launched. The Impulse is the first aircraft designed to fly both day and night without using fossil fuel or releasing any emissions.

Developed by Bertrand Piccard, the son of the famous Swiss oceanographer and engineer Jacques Piccardand André Borschberg (PDF) Its mission is to demonstrate the feasibility of a complete day-night-day cycle propelled solely by solar energy. Expected to make its first test flight between now and the end of 2009, first of all at Dübendorf airport and then from Payerne air base. A first complete night flight is programmed for 2010 and will take place over Switzerland.

The plane which is glider-like In appearance and design utilises advancements in electric, solar and battery technologies to make this unique flight possible.

26 June 2009

This toaster was built from scratch by Thomas Thwaites, a design student at the Royal College of Art, London, as a project in extreme self-sufficiency and to highlight the effects of mass production we take for granted.

Using a £5 ($8) toaster as a model he spent a 9-month period, gathering the raw material by hand from mines across the UK and processing them himself. He smelted the iron ore in an old microwave.

The final product cost close to £1200 ($2000), more than 200 times the cost of his shop-bought model. The toaster will be on display at the RCA Summer show in London this week, where Thwaites hopes to "toast [visitors] something".

(Image: Daniel Alexander)

23 June 2009

This photograph was taken from on board the International Space Station as it passed above Sarychev Peak on Matua Island.

This is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril island chain, northeast of Japan.

A NASA spokesperson said the image "captures several phenomena that occur during the earliest stages of an explosive volcanic eruption."

After these ants are infected by the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the insects abandon their nests for the underside of leaves. Before they die, the rainforest-dwelling ants bite tightly onto leaves.

The fungus then glues the dead ant to the leaf and ejects its spores into the forest via a stalk through the ant's head. A new study (PLoS-ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004835) finds these dead ants clumped together in forest "graveyards", rarely visited by living workers.

Saturn and four of its 60 moons appear in a rare group portrait in this Hubble Space Telescope image taken on 24 February 2009. The large, orange moon Titan casts a shadow on the planet, as does the smaller moon Mimas (white dot near the ring plane), which resembles the 'Death Star' from Star Wars. Farther to the left, and off Saturn's disc, lie the bright, icy satellite Dione and the much fainter Enceladus, which spews supersonic water jets into space.

Astronomers can observe the moons passing in front of Saturn's disc in such "transits" when the planet's famous rings lie approximately 'edge-on' as seen from Earth – an alignment that occurs every 14 to 15 years.

The geometry has been good for catching the transits in early 2009, as the rings and Earth are nearly in the same plane. They will be in exactly the same plane on 10 August and 4 September 2009, though Saturn will lie too close to the Sun at that time to be a good observing target for ground-based telescopes.

Hubble observed the last "ring plane crossing" in 1995 and 1996, when it helped discover several new moons of Saturn. (Image: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage/STScI/AURA)

A newly found moonlet inside Saturn's faint G ring appears in this sequence of images, taken by the Cassini spacecraft over the course of about 10 minutes on 27 October 2008.

The tiny moon appears to be about half a kilometre wide and is likely a major source of material in the G ring. Debris knocked off this moon forms a relatively bright arc of material near the inner edge of the G ring, the most visible part of the ring in these images. That arc, in turn, leaks material to form the entire ring.

"Before Cassini, the G ring was the only dusty ring that was not clearly associated with a known moon, which made it odd," Cassini imaging team member Matthew Hedman of Cornell University said in a statement.

Hedman and his collaborators also have found that the moonlet's orbit is being disturbed by the larger, nearby moon Mimas, which is responsible for keeping the ring arc together.

In early 2010, Cassini's camera will take a closer look at the arc and the moonlet. (Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

Satellite launch fails

The reason is thought to be a failure of the protective fairing - shown here as it was about to be fitted to the spacecraft at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California - to separate as it was supposed to. As a result, the instrument did not reach its orbit and the mission failed.

The fairing is a moulded structure that fits flush with the outside surface of the rocket. It protects the spacecraft during launch and ascent.

Its strangely-coloured bones and blood are caused by a pigment called biliverdin, which is a waste product usually processed in the liver.

In this species, the biliverdin is passed back into the blood, giving it a green colour. The green biliverdin is visible through the frog's thin, translucent skin, making it even better camouflaged and possibly even causing it to taste unpalatable to predators.

(Image: J Holden, Fauna and Flora International)

Today at the UN climate talks in Poznan, Poland, Al Gore has called for the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to be stabilised at 350 parts per million (ppm) from current levels of more than 380ppm.

On Monday the climate change pressure group 350.org organised children to lay down in a square in Poznan and spell out the message.

Former vice-president Gore told the Poznan summit that the old goal of 450ppm is "inadequate." We "need to toughen that goal to 350 parts per million."

California's wildfires close in on Los Angeles.

This image shows the Los Angeles metropolitan area on November 16, 2008. The red squares show the two active fires: the Sayre Fire (just north of San Fernando), middle, and the Freeway Fire, bottom-right.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory is NASA's latest toy to arrive at its launch pad in California. It will map the globe every 16 days, making precise measurements of where carbon dioxide is being emitted and where it is absorbed.